Posted on 10/07/2007 3:19:23 PM PDT by melt
Yesterday, I had the good “fortune” of being frontpaged on Daily Kos. The post sat atop the site for two hours. According to Google Analytics, the link produced 1,164 visitors yesterday. For the traffic behemoth Kos is portrayed as, that seems low, especially since he linked to two posts of mine. I went and looked at other notable traffic spikes this year, and this one isn’t really even close to some other blockbuster links.
For instance,
A Marc Ambinder link (linked to by Andrew Sullivan) to my 2008 Wire videowall produced 2,205 visits on June 5th.
A link from the Real Clear Politics homepage on August 17th produced 1,889 visits. Now, Kos was semi-complimentary in his link. He wasn’t direct in telling his readers to rape and pillage my servers. And I know well that the wording of a link and how it’s presented can dramatically impact the clickthrough rate. If there’s a site I need to link to but I don’t want to reward with lots of traffic, I hyperlink certain words and not others to minimize clickthrough (in addition to sticking in a rel=”nofollow” directive).
But this got me thinking, especially since a sub-theme in the linked post suggested Kos was not all he was cracked up to be in terms of his audience size.
Earlier today, it was pointed out to me that Kos’s average visit length was all of 2 seconds, suggesting either a coordinated attempt to bomb the site with fake traffic or an extremely low level of engagement on the part of his readers. This seemed as remarkable, given the breathless huffing and puffing about his community platform being a game changer in terms of traffic and audience reach.
So I started to do some digging around his SiteMeter stats...
(Excerpt) Read more at patrickruffini.com ...
"Fake, but accurate" numbers on Daily Kos. The site's owner must have been taking courses at the "Dan Rather School of Honesty"...
Phony Pajamma Stats
They are all full of it. No one I know even knows who these fudge-packers are.
It appears that the trapdoor on Kos’ bunnysuit jammies is flapping in the breeze. ;)
"SiteMeter only accounts for the last 100 visitors individually. On a site like Daily Kos, the 100th most recent visitor could have been 15 seconds ago. If you are the 101st most recent visitor and you click on a new page, you are counted as a new unique visitor in SiteMeter’s all important count. On a normal site, this wouldn’t matter, since it’s highly unlikely you’ll stick around long enough to have 100 others show up after you. On a site with hundreds of thousands of page views a day, it’s extremely likely you will."
What is it with this guy’s eyes and mouth? Do they always have to be open as far as possible?
This is great! Get the popcorn. Can and one spell f-r-a-u-d?
What? You’ve never seen a speed freak before?
so clicks can be manipulated.
How to manipulate them beyond the absurd to show the fraud?
Don’t you have that chart rather inverted? The number point downward, but the numbers are increasing?
Could it be that the Daily Kos has lots of people who designate it as their homepage so that whenever they open their browser the homepage loads and gets counted? That would explain both the high visitor count and the low average visit durations.
I am amazed that Kos has any traffic at all.
Even the slightest hint of independent (or sane) thought is met with instant banning.
It is a link to the graph procuded.
I just entered both names.
ROTFLMAO
The MSM reporters are all kos attendees.
What a scam. This is like pumping water into a ham to artificially expand its volume--- and make a profit. It just ain't "Kos"her...!
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